Constantine IX Monomachos
Constantine IX presided over the schism between the Latin and Greek churches, the arrival of the Seljuk Turks, and the disbanding of the frontier army. He came to the throne in 1042 by marrying Zoe, the sixty-four-year-old daughter of a previous emperor, who was on her third husband and whose sister Theodora was co-empress; the arrangement made him emperor of a state whose legitimacy ran through the two women. He was cultured, generous, and completely uninterested in the frontier. His reign refounded the university of Constantinople with faculties of law and philosophy, and Michael Psellos, who ran the philosophy school and wrote the history that is the main source for the period, describes a court of enormous expense and casual government. The military policy was the disaster. Constantine converted the obligation of Armenian and Anatolian frontier troops from service into a cash payment, disbanding the thematic armies that had defended the eastern approaches for three centuries, and annexed the Armenian kingdom of Ani in 1045, removing the buffer state that had absorbed the first raids. The Seljuks arrived within a few years. In 1054 papal legates sent to negotiate an alliance against the Normans in southern Italy laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia and the patriarch excommunicated them back, in a quarrel over azymes, clerical marriage and papal primacy that neither side treated as final at the time. He also faced a Rus fleet and two serious revolts. He died in 1055. The mutual excommunications of 1054 were lifted in 1965, and the churches are still not in communion. Sixteen years after his death the eastern army he had dismantled was destroyed at Manzikert, and Anatolia was lost.
- Lived: 1000 CE – 1055 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
